Ask a palaeontologist where they would dig if they could choose anywhere in North America, and Wyoming comes up quickly. The state sits on an almost uninterrupted stack of sedimentary rock recording hundreds of millions of years, and the dry, sparsely vegetated badlands keep pushing fresh bone to the surface. The right rocks, and very little covering them: that combination is why Wyoming has been central to dinosaur science for close to 150 years.
Como Bluff and the Bone Wars
The modern chapter begins in 1877 near Como Bluff in the southeast of the state. Two Union Pacific railroad men, William Harlow Reed and William Edwards Carlin, found large bones weathering out of the Late Jurassic rock of the Morrison Formation and wrote to Professor Othniel Charles Marsh at Yale. What followed became one of the strangest episodes in the history of science, the long and often bitter rivalry between Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope that we now call the Bone Wars, fought in no small part through Wyoming quarries.
The rivalry was unedifying. The fossils were extraordinary. Allosaurus, Apatosaurus, Diplodocus, Camarasaurus and Stegosaurus all came out of Morrison rock, and the long-necked sauropods hauled from Wyoming quarries became the animals most people still picture when they hear the word dinosaur.
The quarries that followed
Wyoming kept giving. In the 1930s Barnum Brown of the American Museum of Natural History opened the Howe Quarry in the Bighorn Basin and uncovered a dense tangle of sauropod skeletons, work sponsored by the Sinclair Oil Company at a time when a dinosaur was becoming a corporate logo. Further east, the Late Cretaceous rocks of the Lance Formation preserve the last few hundred thousand years before the end-Cretaceous extinction, which is why Triceratops and Tyrannosaurus turn up in that part of the state. Triceratops is Wyoming’s state dinosaur.
Not only dinosaurs
The state fossil is not a dinosaur at all. It is Knightia, a small herring-like fish from the Eocene lake beds of the Green River Formation, preserved in such numbers and such detail that specimens hang on walls around the world. Older still, the marine rocks of the Bighorn Basin hold the animals that swam over Wyoming when much of the interior of the continent was a seaway.
Why the story is not finished
For most of that 150 years the pattern has been the same: the fossils are found in Wyoming and studied, displayed and stored somewhere else. The Wyoming Dinosaurium Project exists to change the second half of that sentence, so that the specimens coming out of this ground, and the science built on them, stay where they belong.
